Definition of Trauma: "Anything that, in the moment, the mind and the heart find overwhelming to prevent or an incident or a challenge that simply swamps the system's ability to metabolize the emotional.”

• Lingering Effects: Traumatic experiences can lead to parts of ourselves getting "frozen in time," impacting our operating system until integrated and healed. 

• Decontextualization: Trauma, when decontextualized over time, can be mistaken for personality traits in individuals, family characteristics, or ingrained behaviors within a person. 

• Neurological Risk: Trauma triggers survival responses (fight, flight, freeze) by shutting down the neocortex and cognitive processing, leading to reactive and myopic behavior. 

• Long-Term Consequences: Survival strategies developed in response to past trauma can persist long after the threat has resolved, influencing default behavioral routines. 

• Increased Vulnerability: Individuals with a history of trauma are more susceptible to being overwhelmed and under-resourced during new challenges and collective stress.

The Need for a Trauma-Informed Lens

• Reframing Derailers: Behaviors often labeled as "executive derailers" or "unexplained behaviors" may have roots in earlier survival strategies. A trauma-informed lens helps interpret these with compassion and reverence rather than judgment. 

• Understanding Team Dynamics: Fight, flight, or freeze responses manifest in team dynamics, hindering collaboration and psychological safety. Recognizing these as potential trauma responses is crucial for effective intervention.

• Addressing Underlying Issues: Interventions need to address the underlying trauma and long-held emotions rather than just focusing on surface-level behaviors or cognitive shifts for sustainable change. 

• Creating Safety and Lowering Fear: Moving towards high performance and excellence requires lowering the level of fear and cultivating more love and caring within the organizational system.

• Recognizing Immobilization: Lack of participation and withdrawal in teams can also be a symptom of threat and trauma, not just overt conflict. 

 The Role of Spirituality and the "Heart Cave"

Resources for Healing
Spirituality, expressive arts, and aesthetics can be powerful resources for organizational vitality, team dynamism, innovation, and deep healing.

Three Chambers of the Heart (Shai Tubali)

• Outer Layer: Responds to moment-by-moment life events.

• Middle Layer
  Holds historic hurts, fear, and terror, which can be activated by current challenges, leading to disproportionate reactions in trauma survivors. 

• Innermost Chamber (Heart Cave)
  The core self that cannot be hurt, connected to a unitive field and a sense of the divine. Tapping into this can be a source of strength and resilience. 

Facilitator's Role: Facilitators need to attend to their own pain and shadow emotions to become a "wellspring of holding and harboring and witness to other people's" experiences. Deep listening has a co-regulatory capacity.

What it Means to Do Trauma-Informed Work

• Becoming Trauma Literate
  Understanding the literature on early childhood trauma, attachment, and developmental absences. 

• Recognizing Regressive Dimensions
  Understanding that individuals have a high-functioning adult dimension and a younger, less resourced regressive dimension that can be triggered by trauma. Practitioners need to be sensitive to this. 

• Shifting Perspective
  Moving from seeing "executive derailers" as weaknesses to understanding them as brilliant survival adaptations from earlier life. 

• Compassion and Reverence
  Approaching behaviors with compassion and reverence for the role they played in the individual's past.

Trauma-Informed Organizations and Leadership:

• Safety and Threat
  Focusing on the level of safety versus threat present within the system and the team's ability to discuss these openly.

• Addressing Symptoms at All Levels
  Recognizing that trauma symptoms manifest at individual, dyadic, team, and organizational architecture levels.

Leadership in a Complex and Anxious World (BANI)

• BANI Framework
  Describing the current environment as Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, and Incomprehensible. 

• Essential Leadership Qualities in a BANI World
  Optionality and Fluidity: Ability to pivot easily when systems fail. 

• Soothing and Self-Awareness
  Leaders who can manage their own anxiety and soothe others. 

• Collective Mindfulness and Groundedness
  Practices for resilience in the face of anxiety. 

• Intuitive Skills and Imagination
  Tapping into collective intuition and co-creating the future. 

• Dancing with Mystery and Soulfulness
  Connecting to something wider, transcendental, and transpersonal through practices of devotion, prayer, and activism. 

 Vertical Development

• Moving Beyond Cognitive Behavioral Approaches
  Recognizing that simply changing behaviors or mental models is often short-lived. 

• Addressing Core Fears and Unmet Needs
  Sustainable change requires going deeper to explore long-held emotions, fundamental root fears, and unprocessed grief.

• Healing the Heart
  Vertical development at this level is about healing and addressing the root causes of behavior.